The Bitter Climb – Short Fiction

Robson © by Mike the Mountain

By Gary Paul Bryant  -   When Mark saw Mount Robson come into view, he knew his troubles would soon be over. It was the Canadian Thanksgiving but just another weekend in mid-October for most of the people he knew back in Oakland. The sky was clear and Robson had a new dusting of snow at the seven thousand foot level. He and his three climbing partners were going to attempt the Kain Face on the north east side of the peak. His sister Caitlin had decided to come on this trip at the last minute. Having climbed together in Europe, it was Caitlin’s idea to try to ‘bond’ with her brother on this trip.

The helicopter dropped suddenly and descended into Rearguard Meadow on the north side of the mountain. Their gear was dumped quickly and unceremoniously into a single pile. In a few moments the helicopter was gone, leaving the team in silence.

Caitlin could not help but be swept up in the awesome beauty of her new surroundings. “Will the weather hold?” she asked, realizing for the first time just how hard their climb was going to be.

“Everything checks out,” Shim responded. He knew that Caitlin was just trying to get her brother to speak to her, having ridden most of the way from California in total silence. Shimm was not looking forward to this climb ever since he found out Caitlin was a member of the team. His experience so far, was bearing out his anxiety.

Neither Shimm nor Meadows, Mark’s closest friends and climbing partners, wanted her to come along.

Meadows saw her as a distraction. “She’s too good looking,” he would say, “leave her home.”

All at once the group began sorting gear, stuffing equipment into backpacks as if the ritual had been rehearsed dozens of times — it had. Crampons, boots, ice axes, gators, water bottles, food, the list was impressive. In about twenty minutes, the big heap of gear was neatly stowed on the backs of the four climbers.

Shimm found Caitlin to be a bore. He fumed as he listened to her nonstop chatter about her years back east at Smith college in Massachusetts.

“We used to practice technical climbing up near Franconia Notch on weekends back at Smith.” she would suddenly say.

“There are no mountains back east.” Meadows would tell her.

“Oh but there are!” she would shoot back not realizing she had just been bated.

“No, there aren’t.” agreed Shimm, “The Rockies, those are mountains. The Cascades, again mountains, but back east they just have hills.”

“What about Mount Washington?” Caitlin responded, “That’s a mountain!”

Mark suddenly stopped his preoccupation with his pack adjustments, looked Caitlin straight in the eyes and said, “Washington is wimpy 6,288 feet above sea level. At the summit the wind barely gets to 231 miles per hour, and is generally well-known to be a modest but familiar hill named after Washington which incidentally, has far more respectful summits.”

Everyone laughed. The ice was broken. The team began their trek to the summit of Mount Robson, a mountain to be sure.

While everyone was enjoying the unusual sunshine, all of them were well aware that Robson was a magnet for bad weather. The route was no picnic, the final summit push expecting to take more than ten hours.

It was already dark when Shimm found a small ledge to setup a bivouac. They were now nearly nine thousand feet above sea level and at the head of a four thousand foot drop to the ice field below.

Caitlin was leading the group as they approached the bergschrund. As she leaped across the opening from ice pack to rock, she twisted her foot and lost her footing. She found herself several feet into the chasm, wedged tightly in the cold narrow space.

Well, we’re screwed now,” Mark mumbled to no one in particular. He was more concerned with the possibility of abandoning the climb than recovering his sister from the extremely cold cavity she was jammed in.

Meadows was having trouble with his pack straps, “Maybe we should get your sister out of the bergschrund before, you know, she freezes to death? Just a thought,” he added.

It took about forty minutes for the three climbers to extract Caitlin from the ice and rock. No bones were broken but her ankle had swollen considerably and any technical climbing for Caitlin was now out of the question.

“We’ll have to go down now.” Mark announced.

“I have to go down.” Caitlin insisted.

“Oh right!” Mark countered sarcastically. “You’ll just stroll back to the campground and wait for us in the Winnebago.”

“I’ll take her down.” Dave Meadows said. “I’m not really in the mood for climbing. Besides, the two of you could go a lot faster by yourselves. We’ll be fine. We’ll see you at Rearguard in twenty-four  hours.”

Both Shimm and Mark wanted to make this climb. They had tried three times before and retreating before making the summit. It was getting old.

Halfway up Cain face, the weather was quickly changing. Mark was leading the pitch as the icy clouds came up from beneath them. The temperature, which had been in the thirties most of the day, had quickly dropped into the teens.

Shimm set two snow anchors and tied them into the tent. Mark, not feeling confident of the situation insisted on each man tying in separately with a Smiley Ice Screw so that both would have protection.

In the tent with the sun long gone, they struggled to find their respective sleeping bags. “I don’t know what your sister was thinking,” Shimm was saying, “It doesn’t make sense to come all the way up here and turn around just because you don’t feel like climbing anymore.”

“She twisted her foot. It was swollen for Chris’ sake!” Mark countered. He did have his suspicions about the accident. Could it have been a small price she would be willing to pay for the satisfaction of making his life miserable? “She seemed to live for it, the bitch,” he thought.

He could not believe he was actually thinking that his sister would risk her life just to piss him off, but then again…

Mark understood all too well. At thirty-three she was still a twelve year old girl that needed to be the center of attention. She claimed to be a strident feminist, yet she also capitalized on every feminine attribute she could muster.

To Mark, stereo-typing women was easy. Mark felt that women were not necessarily weaker, just more prone to enunciate the difficult, play out the pain, in other words; whine.

In Marks mind, men put up with crap because that’s what men do. You don’t open your mouth until you’re ready to follow it up with some kind of action. Women on the other hand, will open their mouth, begin complaining at the slightest sensation of a gentle breeze. Complain that it’s too cold when the temperature went from 72 to 70 degrees. Complain about decaf when the barista gets the order wrong: “Oh! Is this decaf? I thought I ordered regular, oh no worries, this will be fine, it’s not what I ordered though, I can live with it, no need to take it back, if it’s no trouble thanks, don’t want to be a bother. Well, all right if you must, if you’re going through all that trouble you could make it a bit hotter next time, thanks.”

That’s how Mark’s mind worked, he focuses on some petty minutia of someone’s personality and the he would pick at it like a buzzard. Mark could go ten or twenty minutes without an audience, musing and ruminating about the imperfections in the people around him.

He thought that the real reason his sister turned back was that she had just gotten sick of him complaining about their parents.  ”People are who they are,” she would say.

Nevertheless, he just couldn’t let it go.

Their parents had divorced when he was thirteen. Their mother insisted she needed to find herself and instead, found an eager guide willing to do the searching for her. He was a wine salesman who occasionally gave her extra attention at the grocery store where she worked. Together they embarked on her journey after a quick but intimate introduction at the local Best Western.

Left to be raised by their half-employed, wholly intoxicated father, the three children created their own family within a family. Simon, his older brother, delivered newspapers on an early morning motor route. Seven days a week, at precisely 2:30 in the morning, he would get out of bed, make a pot of coffee, fill a thermos and proceed out into the weather to warm up his 1973 Dodge pick-up.

Mark was recalling how the truck would wake him every night. No muffler, no money to fix it. For ten minutes, he would let that piece of shit run before he drove it away. He would spend the rest of the early morning delivering papers in that gas guzzling pile of junk. “What an asshole!” Mark mused.

Shimm was fumbling through his pack trying to find a flashlight. “You, know, if we had gone to Half Moon Bay instead of the Canadian Rockies, we wouldn’t be here now.” Shimm said aloud, ripping the zipper off a small pouch that contained the miniature flashlight.

“No shit,” Mark replied, “and if we hadn’t climbed this mountain in the middle of winter we wouldn’t be perched on a ledge with a four thousand foot drop to the …”

“It isn’t winter.” Shimm said.

“What?”

It isn’t winter. It’s fall. You know autumn. Winter doesn’t start for four more weeks. Shimm was satisfied he had gotten the stove to work and was confident in his knowledge of the seasons.

They had known each other since high school. They had grown up in Wenatchee, Washington, spending their free time learning to rock climb in Icicle Canyon and at Peshastin Pinnacles.

The wind was picking up again. The temperature was eight degrees Fahrenheit, according to the thermometer clipped to Marks pack. “It’s winter” he insisted.

What pissed Mark off the most about his parents was that after eight years of blessed divorce, they are back together again. His father had quit drinking and had taken up a religious life according to the teachings of Ram Daas.

“Now there’s an asshole,’ Mark thought to himself, not sure in his own mind which man he was referring to.

His mom wasn’t doing much better. In fact, she still had the wine-selling-find-yourself guide in tow. Moreover, she wasn’t about to give him up. All three ended up living together. Fortunately, we were all grown when that shit happened, Mark thought. “Damn, what assholes!” He found himself saying aloud.

“We need food!” Shimm announced, as he once again began fumbling through his pack. Out came an aluminum container of stove fuel followed by a small single burner stove. Shimm had a suspicion that they didn’t have any way to light the stove but he didn’t seem to care. The altitude and lack of food had started to affect him, but neither he nor Mark was aware of the situation.

Shimm found a butane lighter and began a futile frenzy to get it lit.

“You’re an asshole!” Mark shouted suddenly. It’s the altitude. The pressure is equalized! You’ll never light that damn thing. What a moron!” Mark added for good measure, throwing a plastic film canister containing wooden matches at him.

Mark unlocked his belay and stood up on his knees.

“I’ve got to take a leak.”

As he turned to relieve himself out the vestibule of the precariously perched tent, he looked back at Shimm and said, “You know, my whole life has been full of assholes. Sometimes I wish they would all just go away.”

As he positioned himself to avoid his own spray in the high wind, his knees slipped beneath him and off the ledge he went. His wish came true.

About the Author: Gary Paul Bryant is an ASCAP award winning composer and songwriter. He also enjoys writing short stories including: The True Life Adventures of Nicky Ridge, Stall, The Bitter Climb, Gleason Snickel Runs Away and The First Ride, which was originally published in 1992. You can learn more about Gary at his website, GaryPaulBryant.com